I started my college experience like any other pre-med student — bright-eyed and ready to devote my life to long nights pouring over chemistry textbooks and hours at the lab doing research, all to make the world a better place as a doctor-to-be. Don’t get me wrong — I respect pre-meds and those in the medical field beyond words. That takes grit, hustle and a genuine passion; if that is you, I applaud you and I am grateful for you.
For a semester, that was me too. I spent hours learning and studying different concepts, and staying up past a reasonable time at the library became a regular occurrence. While I don’t have any regrets about my first semester, I was completely burned out. Reassessing my experience led me to take the spring semester off.
The first few weeks of my semester break were rough — I felt like I was in a weird limbo since it was the first time I had taken a real break from academics. But it was this break that gave me time to rest, evaluate what I was doing and watch some Netflix. Enter Merlin — a BBC television show that followed Merlin, a mythological wizard from Arthurian legends, in his earlier years and his adventures and friendship with his future ally, Prince Arthur. It is also the first TV show I’ve watched in its entirety (except for food shows).
Merlin reminded me that the beauty of imagination is how it can take you anywhere you’d like. I realize books and movies (and other shows) do this too, but this story re-introduced me to what it feels to be so intrigued with a story that it becomes real. Before watching this show, I was mostly into historical fiction or anything that had traceable logic. Watching Merlin encouraged me to suspend my disbelief. It also took me back to my childhood, where fairy tales mingled with everyday life to make a magical story. Most importantly, though, it showed me how art and story are life-sustaining forces. Life can be rough, and taking a break from reality to enter a whole different world sometimes is okay and good. Merlin reaffirmed to me how necessary art is to our culture and led me back to my first academic love — English.
To me, a humanities degree can sometimes feel like a risk. But I’ve found that making art is worth it. STEM majors’ careers and innovations are incredible — they directly impact our everyday lives and we can’t go far without them — but art can impact how we think, perceive and feel about ideas and the world around us.
If someone a year ago would have told me that a TV show I would watch during a gap semester in the midst of a pandemic would change the way I think about my academic career, I probably would have nodded and slowly backed away. But sometimes, being willing to change your mind and perception of an idea is all it takes for something, dare I say something lifechanging, to happen.